Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Examination:

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB graphics card doesn't use AMD's reference heatsink on this RV770LE graphics card. Sapphire uses a dual-slot cooler on this graphics card, but it just cools the GPU and not the video memory. There is a passive aluminum heatsink in front of the GPU cooler that just cools some additional circuitry. The RV770LE continues to use a 55nm fabrication process, 575MHz reference clock, 640 stream processing units, and has a 256-bit memory bus. The 512MB GDDR3 memory used by this Sapphire Technology graphics card is Qimonda's HYB18H512321BF-10. With the memory frequency being set at 900MHz by default, there is an easy 100MHz of overclocking out of this Qimonda GDDR3 memory that's rated to run at 1GHz.

Like the Radeon HD 4850, the Radeon HD 4830 requires a 6-pin PCI Express power connector for supplying this performance-oriented graphics card with the necessary power. AMD also recommends that the system's power supply is rated for 450 Watts or higher. The Radeon HD 4830 does support CrossFireX Technology for running up to four Radeon HD 4830 graphics cards to split the rendering workload, but currently the Catalyst Linux driver supports only two cards in CrossFire.

From the backside of the graphics card the four screws that hold the heatsink in place are exposed. The connectors on this graphics card include two dual-link DVI and one HDTV video output. Like the other R600/700 graphics cards, when using the included HDMI adapter there is 7.1 channel audio support.